No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 1526.

I heard the majority was bringing legislation forward to clean up a major policy crisis taking place within the first 100 days of the Trump administration, and that sounded pretty good to me because we are drowning in crises. The problem is that this bill does not address any of the real major policy crises of the first 100 days that Trump has caused for America. They are wasting our time with this bill by misdiagnosing and mislabeling the judicial response to these crises as a crisis itself.

The whole country is reeling right now from the economic disaster Trump has plunged us into. He destroyed more than $10 trillion in American wealth in 1 single week, and then he went golfing and bragged to America about winning the tournament at his own golf course. Madam Speaker, that is like bragging about being endorsed by your own campaign manager.

With so much winning, the country can hardly stand how much winning Trump is doing for himself, Elon Musk, and his billionaire Cabinet. Perhaps he could have yelled fore on the fareway so tens of millions of Americans could have taken our retirement savings out of the stock market before he hit us in the head with a golf ball.

Trump's ruinous tariffs have crushed our relationships with democratic allies and loyal trade partners like Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, and France while delicately carving out an exception for Trump's friends in the home office back in Russia.

When asked why Putin uniquely escapes the wrath of Trump's global trade war, we are told it is because Trump doesn't want to interfere with the negotiations taking place between Russia and Ukraine for a cease-fire, an explanation that might have somewhat more force if Trump had not made sure that the tariffs do apply to Ukraine as they do.

The basis for this most imbecilic and destructive trade war in the history of the world is the profound economic research and policy writings of one Ron Vara, a completely fictional economist conjured up by Trump adviser Peter Navarro, a real person whom Elon Musk just called a moron and dumb as a sack of bricks.

Navarro's last name, delightfully, is an anagram for Ron Vara. Madam Speaker, you can try this yourself at home. Navarro turns into Ron Vara. Navarro figured that out himself. That is perhaps the greatest achievement of the Trump administration so far. What an enchanting and clever basis upon which to crash the economy of the United States of America.

Despite the fact that Congress, not the President, has the power to regulate international commerce and legislate tariffs, our GOP colleagues don't even want to have one hearing on the breathtaking economic folly and wreckage of this fling into the abyss of trade war with the world, much less do they want to do anything to reverse this policy nightmare for tens of millions of businesspeople, farmers, workers, retirees, and consumers being throttled by this historic, self-inflicted wound.

No, today they want to talk about the real emergency, which is the power of the United States district courts to issue universal injunctions rather than just injunctions that apply to the specific parties in the case.

It seems like a rather boutique and esoteric issue to raise in the middle of an economic catastrophe that they just foisted upon America, but there is a method to the madness. You see, Madam Speaker, Federal judges have issued at least 68 court orders that block or pause the administration's lawlessness to prevent irreparable harm in the country from his unconstitutional actions. The judges deciding here were appointed by five different Presidents, both Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents, in 11 different district courts across seven circuits. The judges have explained in painstaking detail what is unlawful about Trump's executive orders and actions.

Trump has offered no substantive critique of their legal reasoning, but he and Musk still want the judges impeached. They say they should be removed from office simply for striking down the President's illegal policies, which is odd given that Trump and his party demanded for 4 years that Federal judges strike down President Biden's policies like student loan forgiveness or immigration policies or EPA action on climate change.

They seem to embrace Marbury v. Madison and judicial review of Democratic Presidential actions but not of Republican actions. They say that is because Trump just won an election. He beat Kamala Harris by 2 million votes.

Guess what, Madam Speaker. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over 7 million votes, and that didn't stop them from suing to stop numerous Biden policies they thought were unlawful. Sometimes they won, and sometimes they lost. It is the same now. Nearly 160 cases have been brought against Trump and Musk's actions. Trump has won some, and he has lost some.

However, our colleagues protest that Trump is different because the courts have issued relief in at least 57 different cases, a record number of cases in American history, at record speed. That is true, but if it seems like an incredible number of cases to lose in less than 100 days, recall that Trump is engaged in a record number of illegal actions at a breathtaking velocity never seen before in U.S. history.

As of today, he has already issued 111 executive orders in less than 100 days. Biden issued 162 in all 4 years. Trump can issue as many as he wants, but he has got to make them constitutional because if they are not, they are going to get struck down.

When Trump denounces the judges as radical left judges and lunatics who have gone rogue like Judge Boasberg, he is just advertising his complete ignorance of the Federal bench.

Judge Boasberg is the chief judge of the U.S. District Court, first nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, who was Justice Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale and a pillar of the conservative bar.

We have impeached only 15 judges in U.S. history, always for serious misconduct like taking bribes, embezzlement, corruption, and habitual drunkenness on the bench. It was never because of a doctrinal disagreement and never because of a judge's legal ruling. As Chief Justice Roberts said a few weeks ago, the proper response in our democracy to a judicial decision that you disagree with is to appeal the ruling, not impeach the judge.

Donald Trump has gotten some relief in some of his cases already. The system is working. We don't need to turn the whole world upside down to distract from the economic calamities they have brought upon us.

All this would be fun and games except the rhetorical assault by Trump and Musk and our colleagues against the judiciary has turned into something far more sinister in some quarters: death threats, bomb threats, and online intimidation and harassment of judges. These judges are currently targets of an onslaught of social media taunts and attacks that call for their exile to GTMO or label them a national security threat or traitors. Even worse, this campaign of vilification has spread to their families, including attacks on a Federal judge's daughter who had her photo and place of work posted on a social media site by Elon Musk to his 290 million followers. These threats followed an actual bomb threat targeting the sister of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is a dangerous situation.

Now our colleagues want to pass the No Rogue Rulings Act which would effectively ban Federal district courts from providing nationwide relief against unlawful actions by the administration. Litigants could request injunctive relief only with respect themselves.

So, for example, if the President establishes a church or bans newspapers or imposes martial law, then each citizen in America would have to bring his or her own case because the courts would not be able to rule to strike down unconstitutional actions generally. That is patently absurd, and we are going to be able to explain how this legislation is a massive distraction from the issues that are really facing America.

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Mr. RASKIN. Jayapal).

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record ``The Lost History of the `Universal' Injunction,'' a law review article by Mila Sohoni refuting what was just stated by the gentleman. The universal injunction, the nationwide injunction, goes back at least to 1913 and has been used repeatedly over the last century. [From the Harvard Law Review] The Lost History of the ``Universal'' Injunction (Mila Sohoni)

The issuance of injunctions that reach beyond just the plaintiffs has recently become the subject of a mounting wave of censorious commentary, including by members of Congress, a Supreme Court Justice, the Solicitor General, the Attorney General, and the President. Critics of these ``universal'' injunctions have claimed that such injunctions are a recent invention and that they exceed the power conferred by Article III to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . . Equity.'' This Article rebuts the proposition that the universal injunction is a recent invention and that it violates Article III or the traditional limits of equity as practiced in the federal courts. As far back as 1913, the Supreme Court itself enjoined federal officers from enforcing a federal statute not just against the plaintiff, but against anyone, until the Court had decided the case. If the Supreme Court can issue a universal injunction against enforcement of a federal law, then--as an Article III matter--so can a lower federal court. Moreover, lower federal courts have been issuing injunctions that reach beyond the plaintiffs as to state laws in cases that date back more than a century, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly approved of these injunctions. If Article III allows such injunctions as to state laws, it a fortiori allows such injunctions as to federal laws.

But I would speak to the consciences of honorable men, and ask, how they can venture . . . to recommend changes, which may cut deep into the quick of remedial justice . . . . Surely, they need not be told, how slow every good system of laws must be in consolidating; and how easily the rashness of an hour may destroy, what ages have scarcely cemented in a solid form.

--Joseph Story, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1812- 1845) introduction

The Trump Administration and the Obama Administration do not seem to have much in common. But they have had one shared foe: the ``universal'' injunction. Across both administrations, federal district courts have issued a slew of injunctions blocking the executive branch from enforcing federal laws, regulations, or policies ``not only against the plaintiff, but also against anyone,'' even in cases not certified as class actions.

The federal courts' power to issue such injunctions--which are variously called ``national,'' ``nationwide,'' ``universal,'' and even ``cosmic''--is now under fire. In Trump v. Hawaii, Justice Thomas concurred separately to urge the Court to take up the question of the legality of such injunctions, suggesting that they are a modern innovation and that they might fall outside the judicial power of Article III courts. In 2018, the House Judiciary Committee of the 115th Congress released a markup of the Injunctive Authority Clarification Act, which would curtail the authority of federal courts to issue such injunctions.

In December 2018, the Solicitor General's Office called for the Court to ``arrest'' this ``disturbing but accelerating trend,'' which it cast as a ``rapidly expanding threat to the respect that each coordinate Branch of our Nation's government owes the others.'' In guidelines to Department of Justice civil litigators, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions referred to such injunctions as ``abuses of judicial power,'' a ``threat[ ]'' to ``the rule of law,'' a ``danger to our constitutional order,'' and a ``kind of judicial activism [that] did not happen a single time in our first 175 years as a nation.'' Several states--including states that earlier sought and won such injunctions--now contend that ``universal injunctions contradict the rest of Anglo-American jurisprudence.'' The Trump White House, in its characteristically measured tones, has hinted that the practice is perhaps not beyond criticism. A growing vein of scholarship concerning such injunctions has also developed.

This Article demonstrates that the universal injunction is a tool with a more venerable lineage than heretofore recognized. Surveying cases involving both state and federal law and drawing on decisions by courts at all three levels of the federal judicial hierarchy, this Article shows that Article III courts have issued injunctions that extend beyond just the plaintiff for well over a century. Building on this lost history, this Article argues that the Article III objection to the universal injunction should be retired and that legislative efforts to outright strip the federal courts of the substantive power to grant such injunctions should halt.

Let us begin with the history. The universal injunction against federal law did not ``emerg[e] for the first time in the 1960s,'' as many critics of the universal injunction have claimed. The Court itself issued a universal injunction in 1913, in the months preceding its opinion in Lewis Publishing Co. v. Morgan, when it temporarily enjoined a federal statute from being enforced not just against the plaintiffs but also against ``other newspaper publishers.'' In the following decade, the Court issued two other preliminary injunctions that barred a federal law's enforcement beyond the plaintiffs within a single judicial district, and in one of those cases it specified that similarly broad final relief should issue. Moreover, at least as far back as 1916, three-judge federal courts issued injunctions against the enforcement of laws that reached beyond the plaintiffs in those suits. The laws thereby enjoined were state laws, not federal laws, but the injunctions possessed the characteristic that matters most to the Article III debate over the injunctive power: those injunctions gave sweeping protection to nonplaintiffs who would otherwise have been vulnerable to the law's enforcement. When the state defendants in those suits appealed directly to the Supreme Court--as procedural law at the time allowed them to do--the Court on several occasions affirmed the lower courts' injunctions, and sometimes did so in single-sentence, unanimous, per curiam decisions. In one important (though not unique) instance--Pierce v. Society of Sisters--the Court affirmed a universal injunction barring the enforcement of Oregon's compulsory public-schooling law in a landmark precedent that remains good law to this day.

Not long thereafter, the universal injunction was brought to bear upon federal agency action. In 1939, the D.C. Circuit issued a universal injunction against federal agency action in Lukens Steel Co. v. Perkins. That highly consequential decree altered the federal government's purchasing activities with respect to the iron and steel industries for a whole year in the run-up to America's entry into World War II. When the Supreme Court took up the case in Perkins v. Lukens Steel Co., the Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing and were thus not entitled to seek any kind of relief, the steel companies' suit, the Court held, ``contains no semblance of these elements which go to make up a litigable controversy as our law knows the concept.'' Crucially, Perkins left intact the propriety of injunctions reaching beyond the plaintiffs as remedies in cases brought by plaintiffs with standing, indeed, Perkins is bookended by decisions in which the Court continued to approve that practice. In Hague v. CIO, less than a year before Perkins, the Court affirmed an injunction that protected those who acted in sympathy with the plaintiffs from enforcement of a city law; in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, shortly after Perkins, the Court affirmed an injunction that reached beyond both the plaintiffs' children and the alleged plaintiff class to shield ``any other children having religious scruples'' from a state law requiring students to salute the American flag.

This history has important implications for how we should understand Article III. Today, critics of the universal injunction contend that Article III courts should adhere--or, as they sometimes frame it, revert--to the rule that injunctions must be solely ``plaintiff-protective.'' They have urged the Advisory Committee on Federal Rules to create such a rule by amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures. They have pressed Congress to institute such a rule by statute--and indeed, the 115th Congress lately considered doing just that, holding hearings on whether it should forbid what the bill at issue styled as ``orders purporting to restrain enforcement against non-parties'' in cases not certified as Rule 23 class actions. Justice Thomas, as noted, has suggested that Article III may forbid injunctions that reach beyond the plaintiffs.

We must be clear about one thing: it would be a sharp departure from precedent and practice to treat Article III as requiring the equitable remedial powers of federal courts to be cabined in that manner. Article III confers a singular power upon all federal courts to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . . Equity.'' It does not allocate different types of equitable remedial power to courts at different levels of the federal judicial hierarchy, and it draws no line between state and federal government defendants. That singular judicial power must be uniformly interpreted, and its scope cannot sensibly be regarded as hinging on the surmounting of hurdles to class certification that were not created until 1966. If the Supreme Court can issue a universal injunction against enforcement of a federal law in a suit by a single plaintiff, then so can a federal district court as an Article III matter. If a federal district court issue a universal injunction against enforcement of a state law in a suit by a single plaintiff, a federal district court must also have the power to issue such an injunction against enforcement of a federal law as an Article III matter. There is only one ``judicial Power,'' and that power includes the power to issue injunctions that protect those who are not plaintiffs.

Finally, some critics of the universal injunction have invoked a strict form of originalism in support of their case against that remedy. But the logic of that argument would extend well beyond the universal injunction. At the time of the Founding, English officers were kept to heel not with injunctions issued by the Chancellor in equity, but instead with common law damages suits or ``prerogative'' writs (mandamus, quo warranto, and so on) issued by the King's Bench--a common law court. And American federal courts did not issue ``Young- type'' injunctions against enforcement suits brought by state and federal officers until well after the Founding. A strictly originalist approach to the judicial power in equity would therefore jettison not just the universal injunction-- it would equally undercut the propriety of an injunction that protected just a single plaintiff from enforcement of even an egregiously unconstitutional law by a government officer. Such a straitened conception of the equitable power of Article III courts cannot be squared with either a century- plus of practice or with ``the implicit policies embodied in Article III'' itself. Nor, fortunately, is that result demanded by Grupo Mexicana de Desarrollo v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc., for that decision rested not only on the meaning of equity in England in 1789, but also on how American federal courts treated that concept in decisions extending through the twentieth century. Measured by that yardstick, the universal injunction against federal law is constitutionally legitimate.

At bottom, the current debate over the universal injunction is as much a debate over the proper role of the federal courts as it is a debate over the arcana of equitable remedies. May courts decide disputes only for the parties before them, or may they declare the law for nonparties, too? This Article's contribution to that evergreen debate is to show how, in the period from 1890 to 1943, the law- declaration model animated and guided the actions of federal courts as they issued decrees on myriad questions of public law. Expanding the frame of our inquiry even by this much reveals that the injunction reaching beyond the plaintiffs-- and the law-declaration model of the judicial power that this remedy implies--is not some late-blooming efflorescence of post-Warren Court judicial hubris. Rather, it is a tool that developed in tandem with, and in support of, the regime of routinized judicial review of state and federal official action that we continue to live under today. Our government is not a monarchy, and our federal judges are not Westminster chancellors; in no small part, the one has followed from the other.

The Article proceeds in six Parts. Part I maps how the current discourse concerning universal injunctions has gerrymandered the analysis of judicial power and has thereby cast undue doubt on the propriety of this remedy. Part II explores how the Supreme Court in the 1890s endorsed an expansive view of the powers of federal courts to control the rights of nonparties through injunctive decrees. Part III describes injunctions against enforcement of federal statutes issued by the Court itself in the 1910s and 1920s and examines their implications for the Article III analysis. Part IV describes injunctions against enforcement of state law issued by lower federal courts from the 1910s through the 1930s and then similarly outlines their implications for the Article III analysis. Part V turns to federal agency action, focusing specifically on Perkins and two cases involving state and local laws that are important for understanding Perkins; this Part spans the 1939-1943 period.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, the link to the entire document can be found here: https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/920- 1009__Online.pdf.

Both Democrats and some Republicans have assailed the clearly unlawful nature of this trade war instituted by President Trump based on tariffs against the entire world except for Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Congress has the power under Article I of the Constitution to regulate commerce internationally. We have the power over tariffs.

The President purportedly is asserting powers under a statute which applies to emergencies in extraordinary and unusual situations. Then he said this has been going on for decade after decade.

Well, then how could that be an emergency? How could that be extraordinary and unusual?

There will be a lawsuit on this, and what our colleagues are saying is that if there is a bipartisan lawsuit that goes to court which stops these tariffs that are crippling businesses and farmers and wiping out people's retirements across the country, and if they succeed in one district, say, in Minnesota or Wisconsin or New York, you have to go to every one of 94 different districts in the country to get the benefit of that. That is what they want to do.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, nationwide injunctions are something that my friends across the aisle not only endorsed but took liberal advantage of in the last administration.

Remember Judge Matt Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas? They were lining up around the block to go forum shopping in his little district because he was the only judge to get cases against Biden there. Then Republicans praised the nationwide injunctions he issued.

The gentleman who just spoke signed a letter in praise of a nationwide injunction that was offered by Judge Kacsmaryk. If the gentleman wants to change his position, fine, but please explain to us why the position has changed since the gentleman was praising nationwide injunctions in the last administration.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his astute observations there and say that Judge Kacsmaryk was reversed several times by higher courts.

We never came out and said, therefore, let's ban nationwide injunctions. We did say we should reform judge shopping and forum shopping. That is the real problem. Yet, it is not a problem if there is a nationwide crisis created by illegal action by an executive that a judge has the authority to counter that with an injunction and then it gets appealed up to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Speaker, just to answer a couple of things raised by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan), my friend.

First of all, that is not what the Supreme Court said. The Supreme Court simply said that this was not a case that should be going through the Administrative Procedure Act under the Immigration and Nationality Act. It should be done through a habeas corpus in the district of confinement, in Texas.

Mr. Speaker, in fact, the Supreme Court affirmed that there must be due process for people who were illegally taken out of this country and sent to El Salvador.

Secondly, the gentleman gives us a false choice when he says: Who gets to decide? Is it the person who puts his name on the ballot and goes out and campaigns, or is it an unelected Federal district judge?

Decide what? If we are talking about deciding the constitutionality of a law, obviously it is the judge under Marbury v. Madison.

Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 7 million votes, and they still went to court pretty much on a weekly basis to try to get Joe Biden's legislation and his programs struck down. The majority believed in judicial review then. We should understand that it is very convenient for Republicans to say, all of a sudden, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't believe in judicial review just because they have the Presidency.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court has already rejected at least two of the actions that Donald Trump has taken since he got in. One was firing the executive director of the Office of Special Counsel. He was reinstated.

The other was reinstating a $2.1 billion aid grant that was essentially impounded and diverted by the administration.

Mr. Speaker, I will answer my good friend, the chairman of the subcommittee, about the remarks he just made.

He is correct that the President, of course, like Members of Congress, must also interpret and enforce the Constitution. In fact, that is the core part of the President's job, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, says Article II, not distorted or rewritten, but to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That doesn't negate the fact that under Marbury v. Madison, it is emphatically the province and the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is in the event of an actual case or controversy.

The gentleman invoked George Washington. There is a beautiful portrait of Washington, the Trumbull portrait, that we have in the rotunda and it is a picture of George Washington surrendering his commission as the general of the Continental Forces, which Napoleon said made him the greatest man ever, that he could have stayed on as a dictator forever, and he gave up his power. He could have been President forever, but he gave up his power.

When we compare that to Donald Trump who is saying he is going to run for an unconstitutional and, yes, an illegal third term, that would be an illegal third term for him to run again to try to take office, so that is why we have courts in order to cabin the potentially limitless ambitions of Presidents. That is why we don't have kings; we have Presidents here.

Secondly, there seems to be a myth on the other side that if a President campaigns on something, then it is constitutional and the courts can't strike it down. So if the President campaigns on running again for a third term, then it is okay. Where does it say that in the Constitution? That can't be right. We are all bound by the Constitution no matter what we say during the campaign. A person could run around saying, ``I am going to be king,'' or if President Trump said, ``I will be dictator on day one.'' No, you will not be dictator on day one under the Constitution of the United States.

Why did the judge tell the administration to turn the planes around? Because of the two most beautiful words in the English language, ``due process.'' Because what they can do to noncitizens, they can do to citizens. If they can sweep anybody off the street and say we are going to send you to a torturous prison in El Salvador without any kind of hearing at all, it can happen to citizens as well as noncitizens.

Mr. GOLDMAN of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to this bill, which is simply an attempt by House Republicans to intimidate judges who issue rulings that they simply don't like.

My colleagues concede that it is the Supreme Court which determines what the law is. Well, in today's modern age, how do you get to the Supreme Court? You go first to the district court, then through the appeals court, and then up to the Supreme Court.

Now, there are many complaints that that takes too long. I agree, but we are citing rulings on the other side of the aisle of Supreme Court rulings on these very nationwide injunctions within a few weeks.

Even former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the Republican star witness at our committee hearing last week on this topic, conceded that nationwide injunctions are appropriate in some cases. That is why this bill is not about the substance. It is clear that the House Republicans have completely abdicated their own constitutional duty to be a check and balance on the President.

The only remaining check that is left in our separation of powers is the courts, but it is not enough for my colleagues to hand over all of their own authority to the President; they want to hand over the judiciary branch's authority, too.

A fundamental principle of our Constitution is that the courts decide what the law is, not Congress and not the President, even if he is elected, which I would note for our friends down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is true for every single President.

My colleagues complain about the high number of nationwide injunctions during the first 3 months of this Presidency. Rather than blame the judges for that, I have an idea: Stop breaking the law. This is a bad bill that gets us nowhere other than toward autocracy.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, listening to the debate, it occurs to me that Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid should have just denounced traditional activism and moved to change the Federal rules of civil procedure: Always better to blame the judge than to take responsibility for your own unlawful actions.

Mr. Speaker, I will close by quoting Thomas Jefferson who said during the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts: ``A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.''

In the meantime, we are suffering the horrors and malignities of this period, but if the game runs against us sometimes as it will, we must have patience because it is a game where principles are at stake.

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